I don’t know why it was, exactly, but nothing irritated my father quite like the sound of his children’s happiness. Group crying, he could stand, but group laughing was asking for it, especially at the dinner table.
Sad but true, and that's what makes it funny. Since that was exactly the way it was at our dinner table when I was a kid, it's when David Sedaris is mining his childhood memories that I find him the most relatable…and funny. After being underwhelmed by Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, I decided to revisit When You Are Engulfed In Flames, which I bought when it first came out, remembered loving, and opted to listen to the audio version this time. That was the absolute right call -- Sedaris, like David Rakoff, with experience on public radio, has a voice practised and smooth, absolutely suited to the stories he's telling, and it makes the experience feel personal and confidential. Also included in the version I listened to were four live readings and the audience laughter was a bonus -- the feeling of sharing the experience made me feel like an insider, one in the know.
One of my favourite stories in this collection is "That's Amore", about Sedaris' old and crotchety neighbour in New York, Helen. A typical exchange:
“What were you asleep?" Helen would say as I opened the door. "I've been up since five." In her hand would be aluminum tray covered with foil, either that or a saucepan with a lid on it.
"Well," I'd tell her, "I didn't go to bed until three."
"I didn't go to bed until three thirty."
This was how it was with her: If you got fifteen minutes of sleep, she got only ten. If you had a cold, she had the flu. If you'd dodged a bullet, she'd dodged five. Blindfolded. After my mother's funeral, I remember her greeting me with "So what? My mother died when I was half your age."
"Gosh," I said. "Think of everything she missed."After sharing increasingly outrageous stories about Helen (she attacked a deaf mute kid!), Sedaris ends with his lasting memory of her, recalled after her funeral:
I am not a terribly physical person. Helen wasn't either. We'd never hugged or even shaken hands, so it was odd to find myself rubbing her bare shoulder and then her back. It was, I thought, like stroking some sort of sea creature, the flesh slick and fatty beneath my palms. In my memory, there was something on the stove, a cauldron of tomato gravy, and the smell of it mixed with the camphor of the Tiger Balm. The windows were steamed, Tony Bennett was on the radio, and saying, "Please," her voice catching on the newness of the word, Helen asked me to turn it up.Sad but true, making the entire story poignant, but there's the rub: who knows if this even happened? A little bit of internet digging leads to Sedaris admitting that his stories are merely "realish", and I have ambivalent feelings about that. When my mother-in-law was caught up in the A Million Little Pieces mania, she nearly convinced me to read it before the scandal over its truthfulness came out. When a book like that, full of drug abuse and sexual abuse and rehab and redemption, purports to be 100% factual, leading to a weepy confessional on Oprah's couch, it feels almost criminal to learn that some of the experiences were lifted from other people and some never happened at all. But when a memoirist like David Sedaris admits to exaggerating here and fabricating there, when his entire mission is to entertain, it's not criminal, but it's not exactly nonfiction either. Here's an article on the subject.
I accepted that while listening to David Rakoff's books that he willingly put himself into what he found to be absurd situations for a gay man (a Playboy photoshoot, a Republican youth rally, Hooters Airline) and found the results to be predictably funny. But it felt like just a bit of a cheat to read the story "Solution to Saturday's Puzzle", which starts with a ricocheting cough drop landing in the lap of the lady sleeping next to Sedaris on a plane, and later learn (thanks to the internet) that he faked the sneeze that led to the cough drop's placement-- it's only a minor cheat, I suppose, but unlike Rakoff, Sedaris is presenting these stories as though they aren't manipulated situations.
Near the beginning of this collection is a touching story about David Sedaris' long-time partner Hugh, "Keeping Up", and the warmth and relatability of stories featuring him and Sedaris' parents and siblings contain so many sad-but-true-so-what-can-you-do-but-laugh-about-it moments that the entire book is redeemed by their inclusion. I kind of feel like I'm over Sedaris, maybe I have a lasting bad taste from the bitterness of some of the anticonservative rants in Owls, but I'm going to give this book four stars because I can't fault his technical skill in forming his stories. And listening to it this time was a true treat.
